This he wrote with extreme rapidity. In my letter, I repeated the offer about the Monasticon; with the addition of about a dozen napoleons for the early printed books above mentioned; requesting to have an answer, poste restante, at Vienna. No answer has since reached me. The Abbot should seem to have preferred Statius to Dugdale. [But his Statius NOW has declined wofully in pecuniary worth: while the Dugdale, in its newly edited form, has risen threefold.]
[97] St. FLORIAN was a soldier and sufferer in the time of the Emperors Diocletian and Maximinian. He perished in the tenth and last persecution of the Christian Church by the Romans. The judge, who condemned him to death, was Aquilinus. After being importuned to renounce the Christian religion, and to embrace the Pagan creed, as the only condition of his being rescued from an immediate and cruel death, St. Florian firmly resisted all entreaties; and shewed a calmness, and even joyfulness of spirits, in proportion to the stripes inflicted upon him previous to execution. He was condemned to be thrown into the river, from a bridge, with a stone fastened round his neck. The soldiers at first hesitated about carrying the judgment of Aquilinus into execution. A pause of an hour ensued: which was employed by St. Florian in prayer and ejaculation! A furious young man then rushed forward, and precipitated the martyr into the river: "Fluvius autem suscipiens martyrem Christi, expavit, et elevatis undis suis, in quodam eminentiori loco in saxo corpus ejus deposuit. Tunc annuente favore divino, adveniens aquila, expansis alis suis in modum crucis, eum protegebat." Acta Sanctorum; Mens. Maii, vol. i. p. 463. St. Florian is a popular saint both in Bavaria and Austria. He is usually represented in armour, pouring water from a bucket to extinguish a house, or a city, in flames, which is represented below. Raderus, in his Bavaria Sacra, vol. i. p. 8, is very particular about this monastery, and gives a list of the pictures above noticed, on the authority of Sebastianus ab Adelzhausen, the head of the monastery at that time; namely in 1615. He also adorns his pages with a copper cut of the martyr about to be precipitated into the river, from the bank--with his hands tied behind him, without any stone about his neck. But the painting, as well as the text of the Acta Sanctorum, describes the precipitation as from a bridge. The form of the Invocation to the Saint is, "O MARTYR and SAINT, FLORIAN, keep us, we beseech thee, by night and by day, from all harm by FIRE, or from other casualties of this life."
[98] "Nostris vero temporibus Reverendissimi Præpositi studio augustum sanc templum raro marmore affatim emicans, paucisque inuidens assurexit." This is the language of the Germania Austriaca, seu Topographia Omnium Germaniæ Provinciarum, 1701, folio, p. 16: when speaking of THE MONASTERY of ST. FLORIAN.
[99] See p. 78, ante.
[100] It may be only sufficient to carry it as far back as the twelfth century. What precedes that period is, as usual, obscure and unsatisfactory. The monastery was originally of the Benedictin order; but it was changed to the Augustine order by Engelbert. After this latter, Altman reformed and put it upon a most respectable footing--in 1080. He was, however, a severe disciplinarian. Perhaps the crypt mentioned by M. Klein might be of the latter end of the XIIth century; but no visible portion of the superincumbent building can be older than the XVIth century.
[101] The history of this monastery is sufficiently fertile in marvellous events; but my business is to be equally brief and sober in the account of it. In the Scriptores Rerum Austriacarum of Pez, vol. i. col. 162-309, there is a chronicle of the monastery, from the year of its foundation to 1564, begun to be written by an anonymous author in 1132, and continued to the latter period by other coeval writers--all monks of the monastery. It is printed by Pez for the first time--and he calls it "an ancient and genuine chronicle." The word Mölk, or Mölck,--or, as it appears in the first map in the Germania Austriaca, seu Topographia Omnium Germaniæ Provinciarum, 1701, fol. Melck--was formerly written "Medilicense, Medlicense, Medlicum, Medlich, and Medelick, or Mellicense." This anonymous chronicle, which concludes at col. 290, is followed by "a short chtonicle of Conrad de Wizenberg," and "an anonymous history of the Foundation of the Monastery," compared with six other MSS. of the same kind in the library at Mölk. The whole is concluded by "an ancient Necrology of the Monastery," commenced in the XIIth century, from a vellum MS. of the same date.
In the Monasteriologia of Stengelius, we have a list of the Heads or Primates of Mölk, beginning with Sigiboldus, in 1089, (who was the first that succeeded Leopold, the founder) down to Valentinus, in 1638; who was living when the author published his work. There is also a copper-plate print of a bird's eye view of the monastery, in its ancient state, previously to the restoration of it, in its present form, by DIETMAYR.
[102] [The late Duke.]
[103] I do not however find it in the Notitia Literaria prefixed to the edition of Horace, published by Mitscherlich in 1800: see vol. i. p. xxvi. where he notices the MSS. of the poet which are deposited in the libraries of Germany.